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New York Times' Nick Bilton (Image: Joi Ito via CrunchBase)

Facebook has just responded to a New York Times article Mar. 3 that suggested the company might be suppressing posts from appearing in followers' news feeds as a way to force them to pay to have them distributed widely. Facebook's answer: No, we aren't!

In a detailed blog post today pointedly labeled "Fact Check" (full text below), the social network refuted Times reporter Nick Bilton's implication that distribution of his and others' posts has been limited so Facebook can charge more people to get their posts seen by more people. Said Bilton:

To my surprise, I saw a 1,000 percent increase in the interaction on a link I posted, which had 130 likes and 30 reshares in just a few hours. It seems as if Facebook is not only promoting my links on news feeds when I pay for them, but also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for.

Facebook proudly informed me in a message that 5.2 times as many people had seen my post because I had paid the company to show it to them. Gee whiz. Thanks, Facebook.

This may be great news for advertisers, but I felt slightly duped.

Facebook says you can't really compare response to different posts made more than a year apart, and that any lower engagement is due to entirely different factors, such as less press coverage of the Follow feature and, to put it bluntly, less engaging posts that didn't interest people as much and therefore were shown to fewer people over time.

In other words, Facebook's saying, there's no pay-to-play going on here. As AllThingsD's Peter Kafka points out, though, Facebook isn't making it entirely clear why a number of people especially in the press are seeing declining comments and other interaction.

Here's the full post:

Our goal with News Feed is always to show each individual the most relevant blend of stories that maximizes engagement and interest.

There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true. We want to clear up any misconceptions by explaining how the News Feed algorithm works.

First, in aggregate, engagement – likes, comments, shares – has gone up for most people who have turned the Follow feature on. In fact, overall engagement on posts from people with followers has gone up 34% year over year.

Second, a few data points should not be taken as representative of what actually is happening overall. There are numerous factors that may affect distribution, including quality and number of posts.

News Feed shows the most relevant stories from your friends, people you follow and Pages you are connected to. In fact, the News Feed algorithm is separate from the advertising algorithm in that we don't replace the most engaging posts in News Feed with sponsored ones.

Some other background points for context:

The argument here is based on a few anecdotes of one post from one year to a totally different post from another year.- This is an apples-to-oranges comparison; you can’t compare engagement rates on two different posts year over year.

These anecdotes are taken as representative of what is happening overall.- In fact, the opposite is happening overall – engagement has gone up 34% on posts from people who have more than 10,000 followers.

For early adopters of Follow, we do see instances where their follower numbers have gone up but their engagement has gone down from a year ago.- When we first launched Follow, the press coverage combined with our marketing efforts drove large adoption. A lot of users started following public figures who had turned on Follow.- Over time, some of those users engaged less with those figures, and so we started showing fewer stories from those figures to users who didn't engage as much with their stories.- The News Feed changes we made in the fall to focus on higher quality stories may have also decreased the distribution for less engaging stories from public figures.

In the past six months, however, we have introduced changes to solve the above instance – the goal being to promote more content from public figures. These include organic units in NF such as "most shared on <publisher>," "most shared about <topic>," and redesigned feed stories for link shares that feature larger images and longer descriptions. Our index of partners has already seen a significant increase in traffic (35%) due to the introduction of these units.

We are constantly working to improve people’s experience with News Feed, and changes like the above we think will surface more of the right posts to the right people.